spring & winter
by elincia
Summary: One more day like today and I'll kill you. AdachiDojima; post bad-ending AU.


Set after the bad ending. Massive spoilers up in here, for both that and the normal ending.

_everybody everybody everybody livin' now  
everybody everybody everybody fucks  
everybody everybody everybody livin' now  
everybody everybody everybody sucks__._

_----_

Inaba is a small town.

Everyone knows about Dojima's poor little girl. Died on December 3rd exactly, late at night. That Namatame guy (whatever happened to him?) killed her, they suppose; or maybe her daddy was drunk. They know Dojima buys shochu almost every day; neighbours see the pile of bottles outside his door, and the Konishis see him shelling out tens of thousands of yen on the same brand.

Either way, rumours circulate and housewives talk about this and that; they all forget quickly, though, and every night Dojima drinks by himself in his tiny living room with the TV always on and the curtains always closed.

----

Adachi visits often. He brings drinks sometimes and food other times, always in blank plastic bags. He fills Dojima's fridge up with odds and ends: half-drank beers, bok choy, cold green tea, canned coffee. The logistics of fitting all his leftovers in Dojima's fridge are always over-complicated; things from months ago are still kept, untouched, on the backs of his shelves.

Adachi uses these things to make sukiyaki or shabu-shabu now and again. He arranges the ingredients pell-mell on the counter, mixes together mirin and soy sauce and sugar however his mood strikes him, and places everything on the living room table in a way only he could manage: entirely without grace. Together they crack open a bottle of umeshu from the liquor store and pull apart their cheap chopsticks and dig in, legs folded beneath them.

"What happened to your new kotatsu?" Adachi asks.

"Gave it to Kodaira on the force." Dojima takes a long swig from his glass, expression unchanging. "I don't need one."

"Oh. Right."

Typical Adachi, young and callow, with his goddamn weedwhacker haircut and rumpled suit. Dojima turns on the TV for something to do, and flips the channel to inoffensive baseball—the only appropriate talking point for two men sitting down to dinner, he thinks.

"This tastes like shit," Dojima says through a mouthful of beef.

His sentence is unfinished, "because Nanako didn't make it", "Nanako could do better", "Nanako always wished I'd let her grow carrots but we didn't have the room"—a thousand things he could say but never does.

He eats it anyway. They drink and drink until the bottle is done; Adachi, tie loose and socks halfway off, takes out all the beer in the fridge, and they make their way through that as well, baseball on the TV giving way to tennis giving way to coloured lines and static.

"Adachi," Dojima says, "_you _made this mess. You do the goddamn dishes."

"I can't, sir, I'm too drunk."

They fall asleep on the couch, and don't get up until noon.

----

Dojima chain-smokes in his office with the window open until 4 A.M.; he spends all his money on Alphabet H—office drawers and kitchen cabinets and linen closet shelves lined with them—and he smokes them until he's sick.

So he hugs the bowl of the office's toilet in the middle of the night, and sometimes Adachi follows him into the washroom. He doesn't lock the stall door, and Adachi will get on his knees and place a hand on his shoulder; Dojima heaves until his eyes are red and streaming, and Adachi just sits and smooths out the fabric of his shirt.

"Dojima-san, I..."

"Don't." Dojima spits out yellow bile; he's been living on coffee and beer for three days straight. "It's not your fault."

----

Ai Ebihara turns up dead just after Souji leaves; March 24th, wet and foggy. Dojima skips breakfast and Adachi brings him cold black coffee and curry bread from Shiroku and they slowly rope off the scene of the crime together; Adachi always seems to have an endless supply of police tape, and wielding it seems to be the one thing he's good at outside of pouring hot water into styrofoam cups.

Girls, mostly; pretty ones. High school kids, all of them with short skirts and high socks and glossy lips. Ai Ebihara, sixteen. Yumi Ozawa, sixteen. There are older women, too—Sayoko Uehara, thirty four. Noriko Kashiwagi, forty one. Nurses and housewives and teachers and interns, all turning up dead left and right.

Murders become routine, after a few weeks.

"I thought we _caught _this motherfucker," Dojima says into his chest, elbows on his desk.

"Me too, Dojima-san," Adachi says, sounding earnest, and presses another cup of coffee into his hands.

----

Adachi moves in the middle of May. He takes Souji's old room; Nanako's is kept, museum-like, in the exact state it always had been in, dolls and dresses on the floor, posters of innocuous adolescent boys pinned to the walls and pink covers pulled back where she'd kicked them off. Dojima sleeps on her floor most nights, using her old t-shirts as pillows and all her old essays as bedtime stories; he has memorized every fact about the platypus—their venomous spurs and electroreception and Mucomycosis—and he runs through them to help him sleep, a sort of sick academic lullaby.

Neither of them go into Dojima's old room; the sheets are never changed and he wears the same clothes every day, and so Adachi's few shirts hang alone on the line outside every week.

Rumours circulate, of course; are they queer? Lonely? Broke? Neighbours hear them argue over the news, and shoppers see Dojima coughing up his wallet lint for dirt-cheap Jex menthol condoms.

They sit in Dojima's bedside drawer collecting dust for months on end, and when he's sober enough to remember them they crack and crumble in Adachi's hands.

----

They fall into routine. They brush their teeth in sync; they return from work and eat gyudon or okonomiyaki from styrofoam; they drink shochu and smoke Seven Stars; sometimes they fuck and sometimes they make love, but most often they fall asleep to the weather network.

Adachi shops for the groceries. Dojima hasn't been to Junes since December; they've added new departments, Adachi tells him, and each day he comes home with bags upon bags on each arm, full of vegetables and DVDs and exotic coffees. Adachi leaves everything on the kitchen counter and the table and the farthest corners of Souji's old room, until their house is filled top-to-bottom with things neither of them will ever need.

They all stay in their packaging until Dojima takes them out with the trash.

----

It's 7:15 AM. The sky is lightening, finally, and Dojima's cramped office is filled with birdsong and the distant hum of traffic; not too early to call Souji now. Souji never talked much—except to Nanako, he thinks, and then he swallows bile; they had lots of their clandestine whisperings in front of the TV. Souji told Nanako this and that and everything, but never him. He rubs his eyes and dials his cell number by heart.

They make small talk, and Adachi brews coffee in the background; dark roast, the way Dojima likes it. No sugar. No cream. Adachi keeps some for himself, of course, secreted in the dusty far corners of the office cupboards—Junes-brand is all he ever buys.

"That Ayane Matsunaga girl," Dojima says. "You went to school with her, right? ...Yeah. ...She turned up dead yesterday morning. ...Yeah, same way as the others. Seventh in four months. You wouldn't happen to know why, would you?"

Adachi pours himself another cup of coffee.

----

There are dark squares on the walls and carpet of Dojima's old room where all his things used to be, like his bed and his dresser and his television. They share the futon in Adachi's room; his clothes are few and sit in the corner of Adachi's lowest drawer; his TV lies in an old pawn shop in the middle of town. Dojima's closet is still filled with leftovers: mismatched socks and ties that Chisato bought him and art projects from Nanako's kindergarten years, covered in finger paint and glue and glitter. The door stays closed most days.

Dojima gropes for Adachi's hand in the darkness, and kisses him, clumsy-awkward, on the jawbone. On the cheekbone. On the neck and the clavicles and the stomach. He lets Adachi touch him however he pleases; he rolls over and lets Adachi fuck him.

Adachi's teeth shine white in the dark. Against the shell of his ear he says, "You know what I think? Now that we've got the room and all? We should get a bigger TV."


End file.
